Your plan and its limits
What your plan allows, what the workspace is using of it, and what happens to the app when an invoice goes unpaid.
4 min read
On this page
Five meters
Billing carries a plan usage panel, and it is there to answer one question before you walk into it: can I add another one?
- Staff seats — your active staff logins. A deactivated colleague frees their seat.
- Customers and Partners — the active records in each directory. Same rule: deactivating one gives the place back.
- Quotes this month — quotes created since the first of the month. This is the only meter a calendar empties, and the panel says the date it will.
- File storage — every file this workspace keeps, added up: documents uploaded onto bookings, the BOL and invoice PDFs Shipina generates, anything attached to a support ticket, and your company logo. Measured rather than counted, so it reads in MB or GB, and it is the only meter you can empty yourself by deleting something you no longer need.
A plan with no ceiling on a metric shows ∞ and no bar. The count is still worth reading — "312 customers" is a fact about your business — but there is nothing to run out of.
The numbers go amber in the last fifth of the allowance, or when there is exactly one left, whichever comes first. They are not a warning that something is wrong; they are notice that the next conversation about your plan should happen before, rather than during, the week you need the seat.
What is included, and what is not
Under the meters is the capability list: invoicing, generated PDF documents, the customer portal, the partner portal, editable role permissions, priority support. It deliberately lists what your plan does not include as well as what it does, because the question people usually arrive with is "why can't I do this", and a feature that is simply absent from a list cannot answer it.
One thing your plan sets is deliberately not here: how many days of activity log are kept (see The activity log). It is not a meter because nothing is ever refused at it — there is nothing to run out of, only a date your history starts from, which that page states in words.
Hitting a limit
Nothing here is the rule. Every number and every tick is enforced by the API at the moment the row would be created — the seat is checked when an invite is accepted, the customer count when you create or reactivate one, the quote count when you press save on a new quote, and the space a file needs before a byte of it is written. What you get at a ceiling is a refusal naming the limit, not a silently dropped record.
The counts in this panel are read through the very same counters those refusals measure against, so the meter and the 403 cannot disagree with each other. If the meter says one seat is left, one seat is left.
You are not left to find the ceiling by walking into it, though. Once a count passes nine-tenths of its limit, everyone on your staff gets a notification saying which limit and how much of it is gone — and another when the last one is used. It is drawn from these same counters, so it cannot tell you a different story than this panel does.
Regenerating a document does not cost you twice over: a new BOL or invoice PDF replaces the previous copy of itself rather than joining it, so the storage meter does not creep up every time somebody presses the button again.
A downgrade never deletes anything
A plan can end up smaller than what you already have — twelve customers on a plan that allows ten, after a change of plan. That is a legal state and Shipina leaves it alone: nothing is removed retroactively, the twelve keep working, and the panel says so in words rather than drawing a bar past its own end. What you cannot do is add the thirteenth.
Past due means read-only
If a Shipina invoice goes unpaid long enough, the workspace goes read- only. Precisely that: everyone can still sign in and read everything, and every attempt to create, edit or delete is refused, including harmless ones like changing your own name.
Two things deliberately keep working. Billing itself, because it is the page that explains what happened — which is why it is built around the amount owed rather than around your plan's attributes. And support tickets, because a tenant that cannot pay is the one that most needs to reach us.
Changing the plan, and paying
Neither happens on this page. Shipina raises each invoice shortly before it falls due, marks it paid when payment arrives, and changes plans by arrangement — there is no self-serve upgrade button and no card on file, so "upgrade the plan" everywhere in the app means "talk to us about it". The payment history below the meters is the record of all of it, with what you have paid to date totalled at the top.